This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Not a single day, it seems, can go by without new revelations about President Trump's reported attempts to stymie the investigation into his campaign's possible connections to Russia. If Republicans and the White House had hoped that naming a special counsel would cut down on leaks and spare them the perception that the presidency is in peril, they must be disappointed.
The Post reports:
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President Trump asked two of the nation's top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.
Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.
Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
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It seems that former FBI director James B. Comey was not the only contemporaneous note-taker of peculiar discussions with Trump. ("Trump's conversation with Rogers was documented contemporaneously in an internal memo written by a senior NSA official, according to the officials. It is unclear if a similar memo was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to document Trump's conversation with Coats. Officials said such memos could be made available to both the special counsel now overseeing the Russia investigation and congressional investigators, who might explore whether Trump sought to impede the FBI's work.") If true, and Trump was attempting directly and indirectly to discredit the FBI, an obstruction-of-justice charge would not seem like much of a stretch. Trump's unabashed attempts to thwart the FBI would precisely echo Watergate, in which President Richard Nixon's instructions to the CIA to interfere with the FBI investigation proved to be his downfall.
The Post also reports:
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Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser under President Trump, refused to comply with a Senate Intelligence Committee subpoena as a top House Democrat disclosed portions of new documents suggesting Flynn lied about his Russia ties to federal investigators.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee must now meet to vote and decide whether to hold Flynn in contempt or accept his attempt to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
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The Fifth Amendment protects Flynn from self-incrimination (i.e. testimony) before the committee. However, the Fifth Amendment generally is not applicable to documents. Should the committee pursue the issue, it can hold Flynn in contempt and direct the matter to a federal prosecutor for enforcement. However, it is also possible that in deference to special counsel Robert Mueller, congressional investigators may allow him to pursue the documents. (For all the committee knows, Flynn may already be cooperating with Mueller. He would not be the first witness to create a show of resisting a congressional inquiry while quietly assisting investigators behind the scenes.)
What we see here is a scheme — shockingly overt, sloppy and widespread — that leaves a well-marked trail of evidence that even a hapless prosecutor (and Mueller is anything but hapless) could follow to construct a potential case of obstruction of justice. Trump was so clueless as to the possible illegality of his actions that he seems to have had no qualms about dragging in multiple players and making multiple appeals to Comey to end the investigation. And then, of course, he chose to confess to his motive for firing Comey on national TV. Given the number of witnesses (including one prominent appointee of his own, Coats) Trump likely will find it hard to dispute Comey's version of events.
One is compelled to ask: What was Trump so nervous about? Even many critics of Trump have suspected that there was nothing incriminating to be found in the Russia collusion investigation linking Trump to the Russians. Trump wouldn't be so foolish as to leave a trail pointing to his own involvement with Russian officials or knowledge of underlings' involvement, right? Well, the more evidence we see of his frantic efforts to derail Comey, the more one suspects that there was something really bad - either about himself or top aides — he feared would come out. Trump surely acts like a guilty man trying to make certain the facts never see the light of day.